Question

I have a data file that needs to have several uniq identifiers stripped of hyphens.

So I have:

(Special_Section "data-values")

and I want to have it replaced with:

(Special_Section "datavalues")

I wanted to use a simple sed find/replace, but the data and values are different each time. Preferably, I’d run this in-place since the file has a lot of other information I want to keep in tact.

Does sed or awk have a way to remove the hyphen from the matched portion only?

Currently I can match with: sed -i 's/Special_Section "[a-zA-Z0-9]*-[a-zA-Z0-9]*"/&/g *myfiles*
But I would like to then run s/-// on & if it’s possible.

Answer 1

does this work?

sed -i '/(Special_Section ".*-.*")/{s/-//}' yourFile